The check is in the mail

I’m sure most listeners are unaware of it, but radio stations have to pay for the music they play. The major music licensing groups – ASCAP, BMI & SESAC – require stations to pay a licensing fee based upon various and sundry statistics, ranging from market size to power output to annual billing. (And it ain't cheap, either!) And stations periodically have to keep a log of what they play – every single song for anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. Those logs are then used by the licensing groups to determine royalties to songwriters and producers. They use some type of statistical analysis to extrapolate what stations across the country are playing based upon this sampling. Works great if everybody is playing the same thing -- which of course, most stations are these days. But it makes me wonder what our FM is doing to their statistical analysis.

My ex-wife was a songwriter, and a couple of her songs were occasionally played on our small, 1000-watt AM station. That happened during a couple of logging periods, and at the end of the following quarter, a check for a few dollars would show up in the mail. If one or two airplays on a local AM station did that, then our music library on the FM must be really screwing things up!

We have almost 2100 songs in active rotation (2,096 to be exact), far more than most standard classic rock stations. Deep cuts, album cuts – whatever you want to call them. We play a lot of things that haven’t been on the air in a very long time. I have this image of some songwriter suddenly receiving a royalty check for ten or twenty dollars when they haven’t gotten a thing for years. I wonder what goes through their mind….